There are several ways that can be utilized in order to solve and mitigate congestion, starting from real time measures, such as changing traffic light timing, ramp metering and routing driver with road message signs and up to infrastructure changes such as adding lanes, bridges and toll facilities to reduce demand. In addition there are measures related to providing alternative transportation means, like public transportation, such as adding bus routes between destinations or increasing the frequency of public transportation schedules.
All these methods require proper data in order to make decisions: data about the congestion, data about the public transportation, and origin destination data. Previous methods to collect origin destination data of those people stuck in the traffic congestion included means such as number plate reading and then tracking these people to their home address based on car license registration databases. Such solutions are only relevant for one destination (home) and not for work place or any other destination, require field equipment deployment and maintenance, which is very expensive, create dangerous traffic obstacles, require right of way and complicated co-ordination, and the data is limited to the deployment points. It is also compromising on people's privacy, requiring up-to date license/address databases which is not updated in many countries and doesn't function at all with some types of license plates.
Other methods include stopping cars in the middle of the street and asking them their origin destination—very dangerous and with no statistical significance, or phone surveys, which relies on people's memory and are very un-reliable.
Some companies are using cellular origin destination data for this purpose. However, such data which is extracted passively from the cellular network is not accurate enough to identify the exact road on which the phone is traveling, since most antenna towers cover more than one road, thus it is not relevant for origin-destination (OD) analysis of a specific road, street block or junction.
In U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,947,835 and 7,783,296 Kaplan et al demonstrated methods to correlate a phone to a specific route, based on passive communication with the network and find its accurate location, but the data used is local by its nature and can't enable wide-coverage origin destination analysis. However, it does provide a necessary building block for a possible solution that will be described in this invention, by assigning phones to the exact road section they are traveling on.
There is a need to develop a system and a method for a more comprehensive and cost effective way to perform origin destination analysis of people who are stuck in a specific congestion, in order to understand the root cause of such congestion and possible curing methods.